InfoWorld has a story on Sun hosting a Webcast next week to explain its Jxta peer-to-peer technology. Sun will use an Open Surce approach with Jxta, with CollabNet hosting some of the Jxta code.

Posted at LWN.net: “Bynari has published three new whitepapers which will be of interest to
Linux executives, systems administrators, programmers and developers.

The whitepapers include:

1. Fertile Ground for Cost Savings – which discusses how a company can
find extensive savings by changing their messaging platforms to Liunx:
http://www.bynari.net/BMC.pdf.

2. A whitepaper for sytem adminitrators –
http://www.bynari.net/Administrative_Issues.pdf.

3. Technical Issues in Insight Messaging and Collaboration Server –
information on how Bynari’s Linux client communicates with MS Exchange
for developers – http://www.bynari.net/techncialwhitepaper.pdf.

It’s at seul.org, and includes this item: “One of the primary tasks in research is the communication of existing research and the context it can provide into the primary
literature. Many journals accept a number of different formats, many of these formats are commercial formats however.
leaving open source proponents wondering about what tools they should use for research writing.

One good option is a text-based format called LaTeX which uses markup codes (not unlike the ‘reveal codes’ feature of
Word Perfect) to delineate various attributes of the text.”

From BusinessWire: Ximian, Inc., the leading open source desktop company (formerly known as Helix Code,
Inc.), today announced the appointment of David Patrick as the company’s president and chief executive officer. Patrick brings more than 20 years of
sales, marketing and operations experience in the software industry. At Ximian, he will provide strategic direction and oversee the company’s
operations worldwide. Patrick joins a rapidly expanding management team, which is also adding industry veterans in finance, marketing and business
development positions.
Nat Friedman, who co-founded Ximian with chief technology officer Miguel de Icaza, will move from the CEO role to vice president of product
management, further rounding out the company’s management structure.

– By Julie Bresnick –

Open Source people –
Pike and Roxen programmer Martin Bähr doesn’t like
to stay in one place for too long — not in a day or a year or even a
lifetime. By 19, he’d visited more countries than most people bother to ever
consciously consider to even exist. He likes just enough consistency
to get a feel for and, he hopes, understand the nuances of a local lifestyle.
As a student he spent several summers on the road, stopping for at least a
few days at a time, calling on a vast network of scouts for housing. Every
ingress, for him, is an effort in cultural immersion. What usually
takes a whole infrastructure and a community of parents or teachers to
facilitate, Bähr achieves every time he hits the road.

Now 28, he was born in Austria, where he lived with his parents and
two younger brothers until his parents split when he was 12 and his dad
moved the three boys with him back to his hometown in Germany. Bähr didn’t
grow up particularly technical, he wasn’t a fix-it kind of kid, but his
dedication to scouting implied a certain appreciation for craft and community,
characteristics certainly inherent in Open Source as well. It wasn’t a
revelation or anything when he first discovered computers during an
exchange program he went on in 11th grade. He spent that year living with a
family in Maryland and learned BASIC on an old TRS 80 at school. He
liked it, but at that point he couldn’t imagine himself sitting in an office all
day. And, in fact, he would spend the subsequent six summers away from home,
four of them covering long distances around the European continent. The
summer of ’94 and ’95, he spent working for both the World and European Scout
Jamborees.

When he first enrolled at the University of Hamburg, his
concentration defaulted to computer science because it was the only option available
after he wasn’t accepted into the physics program. During his second year of
university he transferred to Austria and added a major in general
linguistics, which he thought appealed more to his sense of adventure
than computer science did. But he grew increasingly fond of the system
administration he was doing for the university and when university officials asked him
to build a database of images for the students at the school’s architectural
institute to access via the Web, he fell in love with programming in Pike.

In an obvious merging of interests, he started donating some of his
time and programming skills to a student group called the International
Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience,
better known as IAESTE. He needed a Web
server and wasn’t impressed with the offerings from CERN nor with that from
the NCSA, which was the precursor to Apache. He appreciated Roxen’s roots
in MUD building and liked the purity of programming in Pike. He liked not
having to deal with memory management and liked that, because it basically treats
every file as a class, he was writing object-oriented code without realizing
it. It was in an online chat regarding Roxen that he learned of the Pike
programming position available with On
the Verge. A perfect opportunity to hit the road, he left school
and started full time with On the Verge in 1999.

It was the closest he had come to his childhood dream of working in
the Merchant Marines where he could sail multi-masted boats from port to
port around the world. With his long hair and gnome-ish beard all he really
needs is a pipe and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine him a traditional
pioneer, traveling about, stopping only to calmly rest by a stranger’s
fire.

When I meet him for lunch on Good Friday he is alone in the company’s
basement offices on Sunset Boulevard. He emerges, markedly lacking anything
namebrand, looking more like a tourist on this famous stretch of
Sunset, than a local, which he has been since On the Verge was bought by Patriot Communications LLC, and
moved north from San Diego last November. He seems somehow old and young all
at once.

The offices are in the basement of the building and open onto the
parking lot in the back. It is a little after 4 p.m., and I find the door ajar.
His appearance is tidy but rural in design — socks with sandals, hair
combed but outgrown, his shirt worn but tucked in. A scout badge from
Lithuania is pinned to his left chest and a Roxen badge is ironed onto the other. He
dons a baseball hat. Everything that amazes me about L.A. seems intensified
as we pass an eight-story Tommy
Hilfiger ad as we amble our way toward Mel’s Diner. The featured
model is familiar, prominent in this latest line of promotions. She is
young, blonde, manicured, plastic in a placid kind of way, like porcelain and
I imagine her outfit costs more than Bähr’s entire wardrobe. I have no
trouble imagining him anywhere in the world but West Hollywood. The
contrast makes me feel alternately protective and impressed.

He is not overwhelmed, as I suppose someone who makes their way
alone through France by bike at the age of 15 ought not to be. He has
cultivated skills, besides the programming that ties him to an
established professional network, that foster his immersion. Aware of their
penchant for organization he learned Esperanto.
He also taught himself to play the Bodhran, a big
flat drum specific to Irish folk music, which, once he learned to play it
correctly, granted him access to groups gathered to play in local Irish
pubs. All of which flourishes even in the materialistic confines of
greater L.A.

He admits the city is too big for his tastes, which is fine
considering Patriot has decided to dissolve the Pike development he had been
assigned to conduct when On the Verge was an independent company. So he is
currently planning for when his contract, and Visa, expires in June. Though he’s
hoping to ship out to a new port, Bähr admits that his current job is
a dream. His strategy is remarkably void of the kind of planning that
Americans tend to construct when it comes to career development.

His current sig reads, “i am looking for a new job anywhere in the
world, doing pike development and/or training and/or unix and roxen system
administration.” He just states it, as an aside basically to any
communication, forgoing even the formality of upper case letters. If
this kind of resourceful and bologna-free behavior at all reflects his
ability as a programmer, he shouldn’t have any trouble finding a job.

About Martin Bähr

Contributions to Pike and Roxen: “A few bug fixes, some suggestions,
and the extension to the host redirect module. The rest of my modules are more
like contributions to the Roxen community in general. And apart from that, I try to
use any opportunity for Roxen advocacy: In ’97, ’98 and ’99 I joined the
Linux
booth at the Exponet in Vienna, and then of course my presentations to LUGs.”

Hobbies: Collects Scout uniforms.

Games: MUDs and occasionally Tux
Racer.

Other project memberships: Caudium.

Lunch order: Ribs with a side of vegetables and water to drink.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

From Net-security.org: Users can execute programs/shellscript by clicking on the
bubblemon app. bubblemon is installed sgid kmem on
FreeBSD and does not drop its egid before executing
programs.

Versions affected include all versions of BubbleMon up to 1.32 installed on FreeBSD.

Slahsdotters discuss a recent trend for free (as in beer) services provided by such companies as Yahoo and Bigfoot suddenly being charged a fee. What’s next?

Mayank writes, “The lack of a proper journal filesystems has always been cited as one of the reasons holding back widespread adoption of Linux in the enterprise space. But this argument no longer holds true, for currently, there are four journal filesystems to choose from — XFS, JFS, ext3 and ReiserFS. Here we shall look into ReiserFS.

Tutorial here on FreeOS.com“

John Griggs at Corel posted this announcement to the kde-devel mailing list:

Announcing Qt-Mozilla
From: "John C. Griggs" 
To: kde-devel@kde.org
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 10:18:01 +0000


Greetings,
 
I am pleased to (finally) announce the availability of Qt-Mozilla.  This
port is now part of the regular Mozilla source tree, available from
www.mozilla.org.
 
The port is reasonably complete and functional (I will list known bugs
and defficiencies later), but has not been extensively tested, so please
feel free to download it, build it and try it out!!
 
Please feel free to post to netscape.public.mozilla.qt (which I monitor
daily) if you have questions or comments, but please report all bugs and
submit all patches and code enhancements through Bugzilla
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/).  You can assign Bugzilla reports related
to Qt-Mozilla to me, johng@corel.com.
 
Requirements:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Qt port of Mozilla has the same basic requirements as the Gtk port
(with the obvious exception of the Gtk/Glib libraries themselves) and
requires Qt 2.2.0 or better.  I have tested with Qt 2.2.0 only, myself. 
There is a test in Mozilla's configuration script (configure) to make
sure that the Qt version is 2.2.0 or greater.
 
Configuration:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To configure Mozilla to build the Qt port, use the following options to
configure:
 
--without-gtk
 
(This option is required to completely turn off Gtk support in the build
tree.)
 
--with-qt
 
--enable-toolkit=qt
 
(These two options turn on Qt support in the build tree.)
 
--disable-tests
 
(The Qt port does not include extra widgets (nsButton, etc.) that are
required by the test programs but are not used by Mozilla itself. 
Anyone interested in bringing these additional widget classes up to date
should use the code in nsScrollbar.cpp and nsScrollbar.h as a guideline
for writing the nsWidget and QWidget sub-classes required for each
additional widget type.  These classes must also be added back into the
Makefile and the component array in nsWidgetFactory.cpp.  Please submit
any patches back to me via Bugzilla.)
 
--with-qtdir=
 
(This option is required if the Qt headers and libraries are not in the
default search paths for your compiler and linker.  If you have the
QTDIR environment variable correctly configured, you can use:
--with-qtdir=$QTDIR, otherwise  should point to the
parent directory for the lib and include directories where Qt resides on
your system.)

Known Bugs, Defficiencies and Things I haven't Looked At Yet:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Widget:
-------
- Some CSS2 and CSS3 cursor shapes are not yet supported.
 
- I haven't looked into XIM support yet.  I know Qt provides support for
this extension, but I haven't looked at what would be required to expose
this in Mozilla.
 
- I have not looked into XRemote support yet and I am not sure whether
or not it makes any sense (or would be possible) under Qt.
 
- No Xinerama support.  It looks like Qt won't support this until v3.0,
anyway.
 
- No support for plugins yet.  This has to be developed for both
Netscape 4.x and Mozilla style plugins.
 
- No Splash screen.
 
- No support for Bi-Directional Keyboards.
 
GFX:
----
- No support for printing.
 
- No support for XPrint.  I haven't looked into whether this makes any
sense (or is possible) under Qt.
 
- Unicode font/charset support is incomplete.
 
- The GFX code should probably be reviewed for completeness and
performance.  It is some of the oldest code in the port.
 
Timers:
-------
- Timer priority is not supported.
 
General:
--------
- No sound support yet.
 
- I haven't looked into building Qt-Mozilla with Qt/Embedded or
Qt/Windows yet.  There is some small amount of X11-specific code in the
current source, but it is all for debugging or plugin support and could
easily be #ifdef'ed out for other platforms.  If anyone tries this out,
please submit patches for any changes to me via Bugzilla.
 
- There is a bug on some platforms that causes Qt to be incorrectly
initialized when Mozilla initially runs and registers all of it's
component libraries.  The symptom is that system colours are incorrect
(on my system, the background of text widgets goes black).  Restarting
Mozilla fixes this problem.

---------------------------------------------
 
I would like to take  this opportunity to thank the Gtk-Mozilla team
(Chris Blizzard and Ramiro Estrugo), Daniel "Leaf" Nunes, Brendan Eich,
Chris Seawood and everyone else at Mozilla.org for their help and
support and for putting up with all of my silly questions.  I would also
like to dedicate this release to Joey Ramone (who died April 15, 2001 of
lymphoma at age 49), Robert Fripp and King Crimson.  Their music made
the (seemingly) endless debugging bearable and was a constant
source of energy and inspiration...
 
Anyway, I hope you will take the time to try Qt-Mozilla out!!
 
Regards,
        John Griggs

DebianPlanet has this announcement about its new flavor of Linux: “The third revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (nickname `potato’) has
been released. This point release, version 2.2r3, mostly includes
security updates, along with a few corrections to important bugs in
the stable distribution.”